Avenue of Mysteries (30 page)

The dump reader had saved books from burning,
and
he’d actually read the books. Don’t ever think a dump reader is incapable of belief. It takes an eternity to read some books, even (or especially) some books saved from burning.

The flight time from Manila to Tagbilaran City, Bohol, was only a
little more than an hour, but dreams can seem an eternity. At fourteen, Juan Diego’s transition from the wheelchair to walking on crutches, and (eventually) to walking with a limp—well, in reality, this transition had taken an eternity, too, and the boy’s memory of that time was jumbled up. All that remained in the dream was the developing rapport between the crippled boy and Edward Bonshaw—their give-and-take, theologically speaking. The boy had backtracked about not being much of a believer, but he’d dug in his heels concerning his disbelief in the Church.

Juan Diego recalled saying, when he was still on the crutches: “Our Virgin of Guadalupe was not Mary. Your Virgin Mary was not Guadalupe. This is Catholic mumbo jumbo; this is papal hocus-pocus!” (The two of them had been down this road before.)

“I get your point,” Edward Bonshaw had said, in his seemingly reasonable Jesuitical way. “I admit there was a delay; a lot of time passed before Pope Benedict the Fourteenth saw a copy of Guadalupe’s image on the Indian’s cloak and declared that
your
Guadalupe was Mary. That
is
your point, isn’t it?”

“Two hundred years after the fact!” Juan Diego declared, poking Señor Eduardo’s foot with one of the crutches. “Your evangelists from Spain got naked with the Indians, and the next thing you know—well, that’s where Lupe and I come from. We’re
Zapotecs,
if we’re anything. We’re
not
Catholics! Guadalupe
isn’t
Mary—that imposter.”

“And you’re still burning dogs at the dump—Pepe told me,” Señor Eduardo said. “I don’t understand why you think burning the dead is of any
assistance
to them.”

“It’s you Catholics who are opposed to cremation,” Juan Diego would point out to the Iowan. On and on they bickered, before and after Brother Pepe drove the dump kids to and from the dump to partake in the eternal dog-burning. (And all the while the circus beckoned the kids away from Niños Perdidos.)

“Look what you did to Christmas—you Catholics,” Juan Diego would say. “You chose December twenty-fifth as Christ’s date of birth, simply to co-opt a pagan feast day. This is my point: you Catholics
co-opt
things. And did you know there might have been an
actual
Star of Bethlehem? The Chinese reported a nova, an exploding star, in 5
B
.
C
.”

“Where does the boy read this, Pepe?” Edward Bonshaw would repeatedly ask.

“In our library at Lost Children,” Brother Pepe replied. “Are we supposed to stop him from reading? We
want
him to read, don’t we?”

“And there’s another thing,” Juan Diego remembered saying—not necessarily in his dream. The crutches were gone; he was just limping. They were somewhere in the zócalo; Lupe was running ahead of them, and Brother Pepe was struggling to keep up with them. Even with the limp, Juan Diego could walk faster than Pepe. “What is so appealing about celibacy? Why do priests care about being celibate? Aren’t priests always telling us what to do and think—I mean
sexually
?” Juan Diego asked. “Well, how can they have any authority on sexual matters if they don’t ever have sex?”

“Are you telling me, Pepe, the boy has learned to question the sexual authority of a celibate clergy from our library at the mission?” Señor Eduardo asked Brother Pepe.

“I think about some stuff I don’t read,” Juan Diego remembered saying. “It just occurs to me, all by myself.” His limp was relatively new; he remembered the newness of it, too.

The limp was still new on the morning Esperanza was dusting the giant Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús. Esperanza couldn’t come close to reaching the statue’s face without using a ladder. Usually, Juan Diego or Lupe held the ladder. Not this morning.

The good gringo had fallen on hard times; Flor had told the dump kids that el gringo bueno had run out of money, or he was spending what he had left on alcohol (not on prostitutes). The prostitutes rarely saw him anymore. They couldn’t look after someone they hardly saw.

Lupe had said that, somehow, Esperanza was “responsible” for the hippie boy’s deteriorating situation; at least this was how Juan Diego had translated his sister’s words.

“The war in Vietnam is responsible for him,” Esperanza said; she may or may not have believed this. Esperanza accepted and repeated as gospel whatever she’d heard on Zaragoza Street—what the draft dodgers were saying in defense of themselves, or what the prostitutes said about those lost young men from America.

Esperanza had leaned the ladder against the Virgin Mary. The pedestal was elevated so that Esperanza stood at eye level with the Mary Monster’s enormous feet. The Virgin, who was
much
larger than life-size, towered over Esperanza.

“El gringo bueno is fighting his own war now,” Lupe mysteriously whispered. Then she looked at the ladder leaning against the towering Virgin. “Mary doesn’t like the ladder,” was all Lupe said. Juan Diego translated this, but not the bit about the good gringo fighting his own war.

“Just hold the ladder so I can dust her,” Esperanza said.

“Better not dust the Mary Monster now—something’s bugging the big Virgin today,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego left this untranslated.

“I don’t have all day, you know,” Esperanza was saying as she climbed the ladder. Juan Diego was reaching to hold the ladder when Lupe started screaming.

“Her eyes! Look at the giant’s eyes!” Lupe screamed, but Esperanza couldn’t understand; besides, the cleaning woman was flicking the tip of the Virgin Mary’s nose with the feather duster.

That was when Juan Diego saw the Virgin Mary’s eyes—they were angry-looking, and they darted from Esperanza’s pretty face to her décolletage. Maybe, in the giant Virgin’s estimation, Esperanza was showing a little too much cleavage.

“Madre—not her nose, perhaps,” was all Juan Diego managed to say; he’d been reaching for the ladder but he suddenly stopped reaching. The big Virgin’s angry eyes darted only once in his direction—enough to freeze him. The Virgin Mary quickly returned her condemning glare to Esperanza’s cleavage.

Did Esperanza lose her balance, and attempt to throw her arms around the Mary Monster to stop herself from falling? Had Esperanza then looked into Mary’s burning eyes, and let go—more afraid of the giant Virgin’s anger than of falling? Esperanza did not fall that hard; she didn’t even hit her head. The ladder itself did not fall—Esperanza appeared to push herself (or she was shoved) away from the ladder.

“She died before she fell,” Lupe always said. “The fall had nothing to do with it.”

Had the big statue itself ever moved? Did the Virgin Mary totter on her pedestal? No and no, the dump kids would say to anyone who asked. But how, exactly, was the Virgin Mary’s nose broken off? How had the Holy Mother been rendered noseless? As she was falling, maybe Esperanza hit Mary in the face? Had Esperanza whacked the giant Virgin with the wooden handle of the feather duster? No and no, the dump kids said—not that they’d seen. Talk about someone’s nose being “out of joint”; the Virgin Mary’s nose had
broken off
! Juan Diego was looking all around for it. How could such a big nose just disappear?

The big Virgin’s eyes were once again opaque and unmoving. No anger remained, only the usual obscurity—an opacity bordering on the bland. And now that the towering statue was without a nose, the giant’s unseeing eyes were all the more lifeless.

The dump kids couldn’t help but notice that there was more life in Esperanza’s wide-open eyes, though the kids certainly knew their mother was dead. They’d known it the instant Esperanza had dropped off the ladder—“the way a leaf falls from a tree,” Juan Diego would later describe it to that man of science Dr. Vargas.

It was Vargas who explained the findings of Esperanza’s autopsy to the dump kids. “The most likely way to die from fright would be through an arrhythmia,” Vargas began.

“You know she was frightened to death?” Edward Bonshaw had interjected.

“She was definitely frightened to death,” Juan Diego told the Iowan.

“Definitely,” Lupe repeated; even Señor Eduardo and Dr. Vargas understood her one-word utterance.

“If the conduction system of the heart is overwhelmed with adrenaline,” Vargas continued, “the heart’s rhythm will become abnormal—no blood gets pumped, in other words. The name of this most dangerous type of arrhythmia is ‘ventricular fibrillation’; the muscle cells just twitch—there’s no pumping action at all.”

“Then you drop dead, right?” Juan Diego asked.

“Then you drop dead,” Vargas said.

“And this can happen to someone as
young
as Esperanza—someone with a
normal
heart?” Señor Eduardo asked.

“Being young doesn’t necessarily help your heart,” Vargas replied. “I’m sure Esperanza
didn’t
have a ‘normal’ heart. Her blood pressure was abnormally high—”

“Her lifestyle, perhaps—” Edward Bonshaw suggested.

“No evidence that prostitution causes heart attacks, except to Catholics,” Vargas said, in that scientific-sounding way he had. “Esperanza didn’t have a ‘normal’ heart. And you kids,” Vargas said, “will have to watch
your
hearts. At least
you
will, Juan Diego.”

The doctor paused; he was sorting out the business of Juan Diego’s
possible
fathers, a seemingly manageable number, as opposed to a purportedly different and vastly greater cast of characters who numbered among
Lupe’
s possible fathers. It was, even for an atheist, a delicate pause.

Vargas looked at Edward Bonshaw. “One of Juan Diego’s possible fathers—I mean, maybe his
most likely
biological father—died of a heart attack,” Vargas said. “Juan Diego’s
possible
dad was very young at the time, or so Esperanza told me,” Vargas added. “What do you know about this?” Vargas asked the dump kids.

“No more than you know,” Juan Diego told him.

“Rivera knows something—he’s just not saying,” Lupe said.

Juan Diego couldn’t explain what Lupe said much better. Rivera had told the dump kids that Juan Diego’s “most likely” father died of a
broken
heart.

“A heart attack, right?” Juan Diego had asked el jefe—because that’s what Esperanza had told her children, and everyone else.

“If that’s what you call a heart that’s
permanently
broken,” was all Rivera had ever said to the kids.

As for the Virgin Mary’s nose—ah, well. Juan Diego had spotted la nariz; it was lying near the kneeling pad for the second row of pews. He’d had some difficulty fitting the big nose in his pocket. Lupe’s screams would soon bring Father Alfonso and Father Octavio on the run to the Temple of the Society of Jesus. Father Alfonso was already praying over Esperanza by the time that bitch Sister Gloria showed up. Brother Pepe, out of breath, was not far behind the forever-disapproving nun, who seemed irritated by the attention-getting way Esperanza had died—not to mention, even in death, the display of the cleaning woman’s cleavage, of which the giant Virgin had been most dramatically condemning.

The dump kids just stood around, waiting to see how long it would take the priests—or Brother Pepe, or Sister Gloria—to notice that the monster Holy Mother was missing her big nose. For the longest time, they didn’t notice.

Guess who noticed the missing nose? He came running along the aisle toward the altar, not pausing to genuflect—his untucked Hawaiian shirt resembling a jailbreak of monkeys and tropical birds released from a rain forest by a lightning bolt.

“Bad Mary did it!” Lupe cried to Señor Eduardo. “Your big Virgin killed our mother! Bad Mary frightened our mother to death!” Juan Diego didn’t hesitate to translate this.

“Next thing you know, she’ll be calling this accident a
miracle,
” Sister Gloria said to Father Octavio.

“Do not say the
miracle
word to me, Sister,” Father Octavio said.

Father Alfonso was just finishing with the prayers he was saying over Esperanza; it was something about her being freed from her sins.

“Did you say un milagro?” Edward Bonshaw asked Father Octavio.

“Milagroso!” Lupe shouted. Señor Eduardo had no trouble understanding the
miraculous
word.

“Esperanza fell off the ladder, Edward,” Father Octavio told the Iowan.

“She was struck dead before she fell!” Lupe was babbling, but Juan Diego left the struck-dead drama untranslated; darting eyes don’t kill you, unless you’re scared to death.

“Where’s Mary’s nose?” Edward Bonshaw asked, pointing at the noseless giant Virgin.

“Gone! Vanished in a puff of smoke!” Lupe was raving. “Keep your eye on Bad Mary—her other parts may start to disappear.”

“Lupe, tell the truth,” Juan Diego said.

But Edward Bonshaw, who hadn’t understood a word Lupe said, couldn’t take his eyes from the maimed Mary.

“It’s just her nose, Eduardo,” Brother Pepe tried to tell the zealot. “It means nothing—it’s probably lying around somewhere.”

“How can it mean
nothing,
Pepe?” the Iowan asked. “How can the Virgin Mary’s nose not be there?”

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were down on all fours; they weren’t praying—they were looking for the Mary Monster’s missing nose under the first few rows of pews.

“You wouldn’t know anything about la nariz, I suppose?” Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.

“Nada,” Juan Diego said.

“Bad Mary’s eyes moved—she looked alive,” Lupe was saying.

“They’ll never believe you, Lupe,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“The parrot man will,” Lupe said, pointing to Señor Eduardo. “He needs to believe more than he does—he’ll believe anything.”

“What won’t we believe?” Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.